New ghostscript packages are available for Slackware 14.2 and -current to
fix security issues.

Here are the details from the Slackware 14.2 ChangeLog:
+--------------------------+
patches/packages/ghostscript-9.25-i586-1_slack14.2.txz: Upgraded.
This release fixes problems with argument handling, some unintended
results of the security fixes to the SAFER file access restrictions...

French Defense Minister Florence Parly took a page out of Little Red Riding Hood when she recently called out a Russian satellite for having “big ears”. While she stopped short of giving any concrete details, it was a rare and not terribly veiled accusation that Russia is using their Luch-Olymp spacecraft to perform orbital espionage.

At a speech in Toulouse, Parly was quoted as saying: “It got close. A bit too close. So close that one really could believe that it was trying to capture our communications.” and “this little Stars Wars didn’t happen a long time ago in a …read more

Java isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. With all its boilerplate and overhead, you’re almost always better off with a proper IDE that handles everything under the hood for you. However, if you learn a new language, you don’t really want to be bothered setting up a clunky and complex IDE. If only you could use a simple, standard Windows program that you are most likely already familiar with. This wish led [RubbaBoy] to create the MSPaintIDE, a Java development environment that let’s you write your code in — yes — MS Paint.

We’ve likely all seen a power tool with a less-than-functional strain relief at one end of the power cord or the other. Fixing the plug end is easy, but at the tool end things are a little harder and often not worth the effort compared to the price of just replacing the tool. There’s no obsolescence like built-in obsolescence.

But in the land of Festo, that high-quality but exorbitantly priced brand of premium tools, the normal cost-benefit relationship of repairs is skewed. That’s what led [Mark Presling] to custom mold a new strain relief for a broken Festool cord. The …read more

FLIR are making some really great miniature thermal cameras these days, designed for applications such as self-driving cars, and tools that help keep firefighters safe. That’s great and all, but these thermal cameras are so cool, you really just want to play with one. That’s what [greg] was thinking when he designed a PCB backpack that captures thermal images from a FLIR Boson and stores it on an SD card. It’s a thermal action cam, and an impressive bit of FPGA development, too.

The FLIR product in question is a Boson 640, an impressive little camera that records in 640×512 …read more

Ubuntu Security Notice 3747-2 - USN-3747-1 fixed vulnerabilities in OpenJDK 10 for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Unfortunately, that update introduced a regression around accessability support that prevented some Java applications from starting. This update fixes the problem. Various other issues were also addressed.

Ubuntu Security Notice 3747-2 - USN-3747-1 fixed vulnerabilities in OpenJDK 10 for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Unfortunately, that update introduced a regression around accessibility support that prevented some Java applications from starting. This update fixes the problem. Various other issues were also addressed.

Ubuntu Security Notice 3747-2 - USN-3747-1 fixed vulnerabilities in OpenJDK 10 for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Unfortunately, that update introduced a regression around accessibility support that prevented some Java applications from starting. This update fixes the problem. Various other issues were also addressed.

Ubuntu Security Notice 3747-2 - USN-3747-1 fixed vulnerabilities in OpenJDK 10 for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Unfortunately, that update introduced a regression around accessability support that prevented some Java applications from starting. This update fixes the problem. Various other issues were also addressed.

Ubuntu Security Notice 3747-2 - USN-3747-1 fixed vulnerabilities in OpenJDK 10 for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Unfortunately, that update introduced a regression around accessibility support that prevented some Java applications from starting. This update fixes the problem. Various other issues were also addressed.

Ubuntu Security Notice 3747-2 - USN-3747-1 fixed vulnerabilities in OpenJDK 10 for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Unfortunately, that update introduced a regression around accessability support that prevented some Java applications from starting. This update fixes the problem. Various other issues were also addressed.

If you have a brushless motor, you have some magnets, a bunch of coils arranged in a circle, and theoretically, all the parts you need to build a rotary encoder. A lot of people have used brushless or stepper motors as rotary encoders, but they all seem to do it by using the motor as a generator and looking at the phases and voltages. For their Hackaday Prize project, [besenyeim] is doing it differently: they’re using motors as coupled inductors, and it looks like this is a viable way to turn a motor into an encoder.

A large hacker camp is in microcosm a city, it has all the services you might expect to find in a larger settlement in the wider world. There is a telecommunication system, shops, bars, a health centre, waste disposal services, a power grid, and at some camps, a postal system. At Electromagnetic Field, the postal system was provided by the Sneakernet, a select group of volunteers including your Hackaday scribe under the direction of the postmaster Julius ter Pelkwijk. I even had the fun of delivering some chopped pork and ham. (More on that later.)

One of the things that always attracts our eye in old movies is how many kinds of displays you see on old gear both real and imaginary. Really old stuff usually had meters or circular recorders. But slightly newer movies often had some kind of exotic digital display with Nixes or Numitron tubes. One of the really exotic display devices was a Dekatron. While these are pretty rare, you can make a stand-in using modern LEDs and [Dave] did just that in an entry into our square inch competition.

These were gas-filled tubes with ten positions. You had to reset …read more

Unless you’ve spent some time in the industrial electrical field, you might be surprised at the degree of integration involved in the various control panels needed to run factories and the like. Look inside any cabinet almost anywhere in the world, and you’ll be greeted by rows of neat plastic terminal blocks, circuit breakers, signal conditioners, and all manner of computing hardware from programmable logic controllers right on to Raspberry Pis and Arduinos.

A well-crafted industrial control panel can truly be a thing of beauty. But behind all the electrical bits in the cabinet, underneath all the neatly routed and …read more

This clever precomputation attack was developed by a group of researchers at KU Leuven in Belgium. Unlike previous key fob attacks that we’ve covered in the past which have been essentially relay attacks, this hack precomputes a ton of data, looks for a collision in the dataset, and opens the door. Here’s how it works.

Tesla opted not to design their own key fob system, but licensed a product based on Texas Instruments’ DST40 Cipher. A vehicle using this system broadcasts a radio message containing the car’s unique identifier. If the key fob is in range, it will respond to …read more

[igarrido] has shared a project that’s been in the works for a long time now; a wooden desktop robotic arm, named Virk I. The wood is Australian Blackwood and looks gorgeous. [igarrido] is clear that it is a side project, but has decided to try producing a small run of eight units to try to gauge interest in the design. He has been busy cutting the parts and assembling in his spare time.

Besides the beautifully finished wood, some of the interesting elements include hollow rotary joints, which mean less cable clutter and a much tidier assembly. 3D printer drivers …read more